This blog collects my postings and publications on IQ, personality and Genius. The Genius Famine, a book written from this blog, is available free at: http://geniusfamine.blogspot.co.uk or can be purchased at Amazon

Monday, 20 July 2015

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If the sexual revolution can briefly be defined as the long-term and strategic legalization, toleration, equalization, and now official advocacy and approval of sexuality outwith the context of traditional and permanent marriage - then one extraordinary and neglected aspect is: that it has been able to happen.

In The West, we find ourselves in an extraordinary situation with respect to sexuality - and the single most extraordinary aspect is that a critical mass of people do not find it extraordinary at all!

Plenty of Westerners apparently regard the current situation of moral inversion with bland equanimity - a situation in which the goods and bads, rewards and punishments, official supports and persecutions of sexuality have been turned on their heads... and yet this unprecedented ethos elicits little more than a shrug or a grin from the masses.

It looks very much as if the sexual revolution has been pushing at an open door - and yet, in world historical terms we are in uncharted territory: there never has been a society like ours, now, in which sexual transgression (according to world historical consensus) has been so actively-endorsed at every level from mass media and the arts, to government policy and the workplace.

This is utterly remarkable - yet clearly it is not viscerally regarded as remarkable - it is, more or less, accepted.

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Why is the extraordinary situation of the sexual revolution accepted so placidly, when it is so extraordinary? Clearly there must be unprecedented factors at work, things that have never before been operative.

I think there are two main plausible candidates: Irreligion and genetic damage.

1. Irrelegion

Irreligion refers to the unprecedented state of incremental mass apostasy from Christianity. We live in a world where religion is not just absent from, but excluded from , the public sphere - and this is something new in human history. Irreligion means that there is no reason - except personal preference, which is labile and malleable - not to do anything.

This means that instinctive feelings of approval or disapproval cannot be ordered; cannot even be rationally discussed - people feel unsure, unconfident; modern people therefore are demotivated, lack the courage of their convictions, and seem unable coherently to oppose anything being imposed from above.

2. Mutation accumulation.

But the lack of resistance to the sexual revolution seems even more profound than this. The impression is not one of a mass of passive people whose instinctive valuations are being violated but lack the clarity and courage to respond; but instead of people whose sexual instincts are absent, weak or disordered - and therefore see no reason not to go along with whatever sexual innovation is being advocated.

The impression is therefore that the mass of people are suffering from a mass of sexual pathologies - such that sexuality is - in multiple ways - weakened, labile, misdirected, futile.

Is this plausible? Yes. There are powerful theoretical grounds for assuming that since the industrial revolution, the extreme reduction in natural selection on humans (mainly, but not entirely, due to reduction of child mortality rates from more-than-half to almost none) must have led to a generation-by-generation accumulation of deleterious genetic mutations - which would be expected to damage social and sexual adaptations before anything else.

Because the development of adaptive sexuality is an extremely complex and multi-step linear sequence, with many things that can (and do) go wrong at every step - and only if every step in the sequence has gone well, will sexuality be optimally adaptive.

There is genetics; then (controlled by the genes) multiple waves of multiple hormone-induced changes - primarily in the womb during the earliest and most fundamental development, and secondarily at adolescence and the development of fertility; there are calibrations to the early environment ('life history'), critical learning experiences and adaptations to the socio-political system and others... all of which must successfully be negotiated for sexuality to be 'normal'.

This complex sequentiality of development is why sexuality is a function where genetic damage first and most sensitively shows-up.

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It might be asked how sexual development could possible be so fragile, considering that - until now - the human species has not died out but has indeed grown in numbers!

The answer is that the errors in sexual development were weeded-out generation upon generation - by mortality rates being heaviest, and near total, among the most genetically damaged in the first place; then by sexual selection and assortative mating as a kind of back-stop - whereby the most genetically-healthy would choose each other and reproduce to yield (mostly) viable offspring - and the least genetically-healthy would be left-out; or mate to yield (mostly) non-viable offspring.

The harshnness and rigour of this historical selection process is hard to exaggerate. It used to be near universal, yet in the past 200 years it has been incrementally all-but eliminated from ever-more of the world.

Thereby the failures of normal sexual development would continuously be being-'purged' from the gene pool - and this was necessary because they were continually incident (mostly due to genetics, but also due to the environment).

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Our current situation is merely the lag phase in which genetic damage is relatively subtle and apparent mainly in sexual and social behaviour; and it will be followed by more and more obvious and severe dysfunctionalities.

The seeming slowness of sexual and social change - operating over a decades timescale - is merely an artefact of the slow generation time of the human species. There have been only about eight generations since the industrial revolution, even in England where it began; and the increasing longevity of humans further buffers apparent change.

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So it is plausible that the modern lack of concern at the sexual revolution was enabled, was facilitated, and is more-or-less accepted due to the high prevalence of greater-or-lesser types and quantities of disordered sexuality in the population at large.

In sum, it seems probable that almost everybody in the modern West, and indeed most of the rest of the world (the rapidity of change is likely to vary by population and location) is suffering from genetically-disordered sexuality of varying degrees and types; caused by the unique conditions of the post-industrial revolution on ameliorating the harshness of human selection.

And this would explain how it is that the truly extraordinary and unprecedented modern situation with respect to Western sexuality has met with so little response or resistance.
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Note: these ideas were developed in conversation and collaboration with Michael A Woodley of Menie.

Thursday, 16 July 2015

In sum: Although both intelligence and personality differences (within a population) are highly heritable - general intelligence is a highly sensitive fitness marker (perhaps the most sensitive); therefore absolute (not differential) intelligence declines with dysgenic change.

In other words average intelligence tracks population average population fitness.

But, since it is highly heritable but not sensitive to fitness, personality should be much more robust to population fitness change.

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The work of Geoffrey Miller made clear that general intelligence is a sensitive fitness marker - in other words, high intelligence is a marker (or honest advertisement) of low mutational load.

(Because the brain is a large mutational target, therefore any deleterious mutation has a high probability of affecting brain function - and intelligence is the main summary measure of overall brain function.)

So as the mutational load of a population declines, we would also expect to observe a decline in intelligence - and this is indeed what we find. So average population intelligence (expressed on an absolute scale and measured - for example - by simple reaction times) has been declining for the same period as mutational accumulation has become significant - i.e. since the industrial revolution began sharply to reduce child mortality rates, and the differential mortality rates between the more-intelligent (lower mutational load) and less-intelligent (higher mutational load) went into reverse (with low intelligence becoming associated with higher reproductive success to relatively sustained fertility rates among the less intelligent, ion a context of greatly reduced/ nearly abolished mortality rates).

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BUT, although personality differences is approximately as heritable as intelligence, personality is not a sensitive marker of mutational load - although eventually personality would inevitably be affected by the cumulative dysfunctionalities of increasing mutation load.

Thus, personality is relatively buffered against dysgenics.

Therefore, when deleterious genetic mutations are accumulating in a population, we would not expect national personality to change as rapidly as national intelligence will change.

And indeed that seems to be what we observe! English national characteristics seem to have remained similar for several generations - indeed until about the middle of the twentieth century; despite the reduction in English intelligence and the collapse and near-disappearance of English genius.

But nowadays, at last - after several generations of buffering, we are seeing the consequences of mutation accumulation on personality, and on national character; with the English population - on average and en masse - showing many signs of change, and indeed decline into dysfunctionality and overt pathology.

Tuesday, 7 July 2015

And his importance? That this is the type of a genius -- whether a large sclae, world historical genius - a Shakespeare, a Beethoven or Einstein -- or a local, tribal, town genius whose name is unrecorded (yet who might be the originator of some great anonymous ballad, folk song -- or a technological breakthrough such as the spade, spear-thrower, arch or stirrup).

Such creativity is so rare, so difficult (far more difficult than commonly imagined) that it requires a special kind of mind -- a mind especially designed for this kind of work (inner work).

There need not be many such men -- indeed, there should not be too many, since the necessary mind is relatively unfit for the primary, day-to-day, activities of survival and reproduction of the species. But such men are needed -- sooner or later, from time to time.

When the Endogenous Personality is combined with a special ability we get a genius - of greatness in proportion to the ability.

But even on its own, even with near-average special ability - and although less-powerfully useful, the Endogenous Personality brings - provides - a special angle, a perspective, to the problems of group living.

The EP will stay focused on a problem longer than most men -- he will look at the problem in a different way -- he will deploy different (more inward) procedures of understanding -- more detached, more abstracting. Hence he is more likely to see something new -- useful in a new and different way.

His stance is less personal -- he stands back somewhat -- he sees the problme in a wide scope exactly because he sees the problem detached from his personal concerns (for instance with status, sex, wealth) - which is how most men see problems: just a a means to that end.

The inner man gets the greatest satisfaction from inner work - it is what he most wants to do.

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I recently heard an actual example of the way that IQ scores, expressed as they currently are - in terms of percentiles, will confuse a stupid person.

The percentile expression is simply too complex, mathematical and abstract for general usage; and too incomprehensible to serve their proper function. Instead, intelligence (in children) should be expressed as IQ Age

In my real life example; a headmistress assumed that an eight year old child with an IQ of 120 should be moved up two classes to be taught with ten year olds; then the Head could not understand why the eight year old child was struggling to keep up in the new class.

Having previously been at the top of the class among 8 year olds, the moved-child was now scoring below average in class tests compared with ten year olds. Since the child's class position had plummeted, the Head thought that the fault must lie with the class teacher.

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It emerged that the headmistress believed that children of all ages that had a measured IQ of 120 were of the same cognitive ability, and should be taught together.

When an attempt was made to explain the true meaning of IQ 120, the Head simply could not understand, and dismissed the objection.

Now, clearly this was an unintelligent head teacher, but the fact is that some head teachers are unintelligent - and they simply cannot understand the true explanation of how IQ scores are generated, and what they mean.

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But, all is not lost, because even unintelligent head teachers can understand 'Reading Age' because it is much easier to understand. If the Reading Age of an 8 year old is 9, then it means that the 8 year old can read as well as the average 9 year old.

So, if such an 8 year old child was put up one class to be taught with 9 year olds, then their reading performance would be average for that class; but if the child was put up two classes to be taught among 10 year olds, their reading performance would be below average for that class.

So if an 8 year old with an IQ of about 120 instead had their intelligence expressed as IQ Age equivalent to the Reading Age; then the head teacher would have been told:

"This eight year old has an IQ Age of (about) nine-and-a-half."

The Head would then have understood that when the IQ 120 child was moved to a class of ten year olds, that child would be expected to perform at a lower than average level (because an IQ Age of about 9.5 is obviouslyless than the class age of 10).

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Note: Of course this IQ Age method of expressing IQ is not possible among adults, or for older children substantially above average intelligence, because IQ scores level out at about age 16 for women and 18 for men.

This means that there is an age and intelligence ceiling on the IQ Age measure.

But the main and most important use of IQ testing is among younger children - so this would not be much of a problem in practice.

And, if necessary, a combination method could be used - so a 16 year old girl with an IQ of 125, could be said to have an IQ Age of 'Plus 25%' or something like that.

But among children up to about 13-14, and not of super-high intelligence, IQ Age would be a superior expression. The advantages of clarity and comprehensibility surely outweigh the limitations.